Encyclopædia Iranica

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Hūšang Aʿlam

(Pers. kalam).Many medicinal properties and uses have been attributed in the Islamic period to the leaves and seeds of the karanb, most of which can be traced to the writings of the Greek masters Dioscorides, Galen,snd others.

Cross-reference

Ḥosayn ʿAlī Mallāḥ

the name given to four types of musical instruments. This spelling is found in most dictionaries. Sachs’ Real-Lexikon has čaqāna, and other forms are also found: čaḡān, čaḡana, and čaḡba; in Arabic jaḡāna or jafāna.

Daniel Balland

C. Edmund Bosworth

b. Mīḵāʾīl b. Saljūq, Abū Solaymān, a member of the Saljuqs, the leading family of the Oghuz Turks, who with his brother Ṭoḡrel (Ṭoḡrïl) Beg founded the Great Saljuq dynasty in Persia in the 5th/11th century.

Manouchehr Kasheff and ʿAlī-Akbar Saʿīdī Sīrjānī

Dietrich Huff, Bernard O’Kane

literally “four arches,” a modern term for an equilateral architectural unit consisting of four arches or short barrel vaults between four corner piers, with a dome on squinches over the central square. this unit became the most prominent element in traditional Iranian architecture after the ayvān.

Daniel Balland

Etienne de la Vaissiere

Mansour Shaki

a Middle Persian legal term denoting a widow who at the death of her “authorized” (pādixšāyīhā) husband without issue was obliged to enter into a levirate marriage (čakarīh) in order to provide him with male offspring (frazand).

Hūšang Aʿlam, Hūšang Aʿlam

Cross-Reference

Ehsan Yarshater

Like most Persian villages, Čāl had several quarters (maḥallas), but the major division was between Upper and Lower Čāl (locally Gali-kiá and Jarina-ma:la, respectively), with some local variation between the dialects, for instance, Upper Čāli berbinden “to cut,” veškenja “sparrow,” nāngun “pinch” versus Lower Čāli bervinden, meškenja, and nāngur.

Cross-Reference

Pierre Oberling

Michael J. McCaffrey

battle of, an engagement fought near Ḵᵛoy in northwestern Azerbaijan on 23 August 1514, resulting in a decisive victory for the Ottoman forces under Sultan Salīm I over the Safavids led by Shah Esmāʿīl I. No single event prompted Salīm’s decision to wage war. It was the direct and inevitable result of the establishment of the Safavid state.

Antonio Panaino, Reza Abdollahy, Daniel Balland

i. Pre-Islamic calendars. ii. In the Islamic period. iii. Afghan calendars. iv. Other modern calendars. Although evidence of calendrical traditions in Iran can be traced back to the 2nd millennium B.C., before the lifetime of Zoroaster, the earliest calendar that is fully preserved dates from the Achaemenid period. The Old Persian calendar was lunisolar, like that of the Babylonians, with twelve months of thirty days each.

Hamid Algar

Ernst Badian

Ḡolām-Ḥosayn Yūsofī

(ḵaṭṭāṭī, ḵᵛošnevīsī), the writing system in use in Persia since early Islamic times, which grew out of the Arabic alphabet. Comparison of some of the scripts that developed on Persian ground, particularly Persian-style Kufic, with the Pahlavi and Avestan scripts reveals a number of similarities between them.

Ḡolām-Ḥosayn Yūsofī

In the handwriting of the various Muslim peoples, three distinct styles are recognizable: Turco-Arab, Persian, and Indo-Afghan. In the style once current in Turkey and the similar styles now prevalent in the Arab countries, most scripts are written with sharp outlines and a downward slope, whereas in the Persian style the outlines are smoother and more regular.

Marie Louise Chaumont

the name of a 4th-century BCE Greek historian of the period of Alexander the Great. On Aristotle’s recom­mendation Alexander engaged Callisthenes to write the history of his planned expedition against Persia. However, the existing History of Alexander, a work of romantic and legendary character has been incorrectly ascribed to him. It is now commonly referred to as “Pseudo Callisthenes” or the Alexander Romance.

James R. Russell

(1831-1909), Parsi Zoroastrian scholar and community leader. Cama worked for the organization of Parsi madres­sas (madrasas), and his consultation was sought also in the establishment of Hindu and Muslim schools. He was associated with the University of Bombay and helped establish the courses in Avestan and Pahlavi. He wrote extensively in Gujarati on Zoroastrianism.

A. Shapur Shahbazi

Hubert S. G. Darke

a survey of the history and historical geography of the land which is present-day Iran, as well as other territories inhabited by peoples of Iranian descent, from prehistoric times up to the present in seven volumes (vol. III being a double volume), of which the first volume was published in 1968 and the last in 1989.

Marie Louise Chaumont

Whether or not Cambysene was part of the Achaemenid Empire is unknown. When the Artaxid dynasty of Armenia was at the peak of its power this region was one of its provinces or districts; it remained so until it was conquered by the Albanians, probably after the defeat of Tigranes the Great in 69 b.c.

Muhammad A. Dandamayev

Abdollah Mardukh

(Kurdish čam “river” and Čamāl/Jamāl, personal name; in the sources also writ­ten Jamjamāl), a fertile dehestān of Ṣaḥna baḵš in Kermānšāhān (Bāḵtarān) province located to the south and west of Ṣaḥna on the Kermānšāh-Hamadān road and watered by Gāmāsb and Dīnavar rivers.

(šotor). Artifacts from ancient Iran indicate that only the Bactrian camel was part of the native fauna of greater Iran, though it was probably not numerous. Possibly the earliest evidence is a painted image on a ceramic shard from Tepe Sialk, probably datable between 3000 and 2500 B.C.

Kamran Ekbal

Roya Arab

(1799-1870), British envoy to Iran from 1831 to 1835. The archives left behind by Campbell provide scholars with a comprehensive first-hand account of British and foreign involvement in Iran and Central Asia in the 1800s.

Cross-Reference

Mahmoud Omidsalar, J. T. P. de Bruijn

Linda Komaroff

from the late 6th/12th through the early 10th/16th century one of the most common types of implement produced as a luxury metalware in Iran. Their form, decoration, and epigraphic program reflect contemporary trends in Iranian metalwork.

Rüdiger Schmitt

Ḥosayn-ʿAlī Mallāḥ

In Persian literature, particularly in poetry, the harp kept an important place. In the Pahlavi text on King Ḵosrow and his page the čang player is listed among the finest of musicians. The harp was also one of the instruments played by the inmates of the harem.

A. Shapur Shahbazi, C. Edmund Bosworth

Wolfram Kleiss

in architectural terminology, tran­sitional elements between weight-bearing supports (see COLUMNS) and the roofs or vaults supported. The development of the capital began in Assyria, when a tree trunk was inserted in the earth with another trunk or branch laid in the fork to carry the roof construction.

Michael Weiskopf

Anatolian Achaemenid satrapy, Hellenistic-era Iranian kingdom, and imperial Roman province. A rolling plateau cut by mountains, Cappadocia in the east contains bare central highlands, in the west a nearly treeless land­scape, and in the north mountainous tracts marked by fertile valleys, especially on the lower Halys river.

Ronald E. Emmerick

Ḡolām-Ḥosayn Yūsofī

(Čarand o parand), literally “fiddle-faddle,” the title of satirical pieces of social and political criticism in the form of short narratives, brief announcements, telegrams, news reports, etc., by ʿAlī-Akbar Dehḵodā.

Bert G. Fragner

Moḥammad-Yūsuf Kīānī and Wolfram Kleiss

a building that served as the inn of the Orient, providing accommodation for commercial, pilgrim, postal, and especially official travelers. The term kārvān-sarā was commonly used in Iran and is preserved in several place names. The normal caravansary consisted of a square or rectangular plan centered around a courtyard with only one entrance and arrangements for defense if necessary.

Muhammad Dandamayev

Cross-Reference

Michael Weiskopf

in the area of southwestern Turkey, under Achaemenid rule first as a part of the satrapy of Sparda (Lydia; 540s-390s B.C.), then as a separate satrapy (390s-30s B.C.) under the Hecatomnid family, whose prominence and self-promotion created a number of mostly Greek epigraphic documents detailing the development of 4th-century Caria.

Daniel Balland

main town of Kōhdāman and the administrative capital of the Afghan province of Parwān, located about 63 km north of Kabul. Throughout history there has been an important urban center at the northern end of the long Kōhdāman depression.

Cross-reference

Daniel Balland

Nāṣer Ḡolām-Reżāʾī

(lit. “well wheel”), a device for drawing water from a well or river or for removing soil during the excavation of a well. It is a type of windlass, consisting of a hollow horizontal cylinder around which a rope is coiled or uncoiled to raise or lower a bucket attached to the end. Formerly they were common features of Iranian gardens and courtyards in regions where the absence of qanāts and running water made wells indispensable.

Beatrice Manz, Masashi Haneda

(Cherkes), term used in Persian, Arabic, and Turkic for the Circassian people of the northwest Caucasus who call themselves Adygeĭ and speak a language of the Abazgo-Circassian branch of Caucasian (see caucasian languages).

Farhad Daftary

Francis Richard

in 1604 Pope Clement VIII, with the support of Sigismund III Vasa of Poland, dispatched a mission of Discalced Carmelite fathers to Persia; the embassy represented the culmination of a policy of seeking alliances against the Ottoman empire that had been initiated by Pius V when he had attempted to formalize relations with Shah Ṭahmāsb.

Roger Savory

Jasleen Dhamija

for centuries Persian carpet weaving has depended primarily on local materials processed by traditional traditional techniques. Such materials include sheep wool, camel hair, goat hair, and natural dyes. This article discusses use and preparation of dyes and materials used to make carpets.

Annette Ittig

The techniques of carpet making are the processes of weaving, knotting, and finishing; structure is the complex of interrelations among the elements of the finished carpet. One of the major problems in carpet studies is the lack of a standard terminology to describe specific techniques, structures, and designs.

Annette Ittig

In this discussion “design” refers to the overall composition of decorative elements on a carpet; the simplest elements in designs are single motifs, which are most frequently combined in more complex units; these units in turn may be arranged in various combinations and sequences to form patterns.

Sarah B. Sherrill

Most of the structures in Persian flat-woven carpets belong to the category called “interlacing” by textile specialists; the term designates the most straightforward way in which each thread of a fabric passes under or over threads that cross its path.

Karen S. Rubinson

Evidence for textiles of all kinds in pre-Islamic Iran is very sparse. It is necessary to supplement the few remains of actual textiles with examination of representations in art and other kinds of indirect evidence of production, for example preserved impressions and pseudomorphs from excavations.

Barbara Schimtz

Because of the scarcity of surviving materials it is difficult to separate the history of carpet making in Iran from that of the rest of the Islamic world before the Mongol invasion (656/1258). Furthermore, the kind of rigid distinction between carpet and other textile designs that characterizes later production probably did not exist in the early Islamic period.

Eleanor Sims

Persian carpets that can be indisputably identified a having been produced in the 8-9th/14-15th centuries are virtually nonexistent. That carpets were used and produced in Persia has been inferred from written sources, both contemporary and slightly earlier. The existence of carpets and weavings from contemporary Anatolia and the Turkman tribal confederations, and possibly also from Egypt and even Spain, also permits the inference.

Daniel Walker

The high point in Persian carpet design and manufacture was attained under the Safavid dynasty (1501-1739). It was the result of a unique conjunction of historical factors—royal patronage, the influence of court designers at all levels of artistic production, the wide availability of locally produced and imported materials and dyes, and commercial acceptance, particularly in foreign markets.

Layla S. Diba

Although it is probable that magnificent silk-and-brocade rugs in the style of the Safavid court manufactories were no longer produced in significant quantities, it seems reasonable to assume that production of less luxurious wool rugs continued in many traditional centers, even though on a smaller scale and mainly for domestic consumption.

Annette Ittig

During the Qajar period there were dramatic alterations in the traditional organization and orientation of the Persian carpet industry and, consequently, in Persian carpets themselves. Particularly significant was the substantial increase both in the number of looms and in the volume of carpet exports from the 1870s to World War I.

Willem Floor

Throughout the 14th/20th century carpet manufacturing has been, from the point of view of both employment and domestic and foreign market demand, by far the most important Persian industry after oil refining.

Siawosch Azadi

In Persia rural carpets have been made in nearly every possible technical variation and for a wide range of uses. Yet there are many nomadic groups whose works are absolutely unknown, and the weavings of other groups have been only very imperfectly studied and described. For that reason there are still many objects of which the function is obscure.

Richard E. Wright

The oldest surviving rugs produced in the Caucasus may be a group with representations of dragons and phoenixes in combat. There is, however, no evidence to permit attribution to the Caucasus. A group of carpets from the 18th century does include patterns and motifs that persisted in subsequent productions; they are predominantly long rugs with bold repeat patterns and have been found primarily in mosques in Turkey.

Walter Denny

Central Asian carpets, broadly defined, include those woven by various peoples in what were formerly the Turkmen, Uzbek, Tajik, Karakalpak Autonomous, Kirgiz, and Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republics (Tzareva, pp. 5-6); in extreme northern and northeastern Persia; in Afghanistan; and in the Turkic (Uighur) areas of Sinkiang (Xinjiang) in western China.

Cross-Reference

Richard W. Cottam

(1977-81): POLICY TOWARD PERSIA. When the administration of President Jimmy Carter took office in January 1977, United States foreign relations overall were remarkably stable. A modus vivendi had been established with the Soviet Union, and the Soviet-American cold war, the primary source of disturbance of world tranquility, was on what would prove to be a temporary hold.

Fridrik Thordarson

Ehsan Yarshater

village in the mountainous area of the Upper Ṭārom district (baḵš) in the šahrestān of Zanjān, at 49°1′ E, 36°52′ N, 42 km north of the district center, Sīrdān. It is one of the few villages in Ṭārom where Iranian Tati dialects have not yet given way to Turkish.

Antonio Panaino

Gernot L. Windfuhr

their forms and uses in Iranian languages and dialects. The term "case" is used on at least three linguistic levels: 1. the semantic role of a noun (phrase), such as agent, patient, experiencer, and possessor; 2. the syntactic function, such as subject, direct object, and indirect object; 3. the morphological means, such as nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive.

Ṣādeq Sajjādī

Ebrāhīm Šakūrzāda and Mahmoud Omidsalar

(lit. “a blow by the eye”), the evil eye: the supposed power of an individual to cause harm, even illness or death, to another person (or animals and other possessions) merely by looking at him or complimenting him.

Eckart Ehlers

“spring.” Iran and Afghanistan, as well as wide parts of Central Asia, have a great variety of natural springs, especially in mountainous areas and along tectonic thrusts. A very general classification divides all springs into (1) those produced by gravity acting on the groundwater and (2) those that have their origins in tectonic volcanic forces within the earth’s crust.

Mohammad Reza Ghanoonparvar

C. Edmund Bosworth

literally “taster” (Pers. čāšnī “taste”), the official who at the court of Turkish dynasties in Iran and elsewhere, from the Saljuq period onwards, had the responsibility of tasting the ruler’s food and drink in order to ensure that it was not poisoned.

Guive Mirfendereski

Eskandar Firouz

(Phoca caspica), the only mammal in the Caspian Sea. It is a relict species, endemic to the Caspian Sea and the deltas of rivers that discharge into it—the region where its ancestors lived when the sea was still connected to the oceans.

Marie Louise Chaumont

Wolfram Kleiss

primarily fortified country manors but also permanently inhabited defensive installations, maintained by the authorities along important land routes, and urban citadels, which functioned as administrative centers and places of refuge for inhabitants under siege, particularly in prehistoric and early historic times.

Mahmud Omidsalar

Cats are not mentioned in literary Persian sources until late Sasanian times. In Zoroastrian mythology the cat (gurbag) is said to have been created by the Evil Spirit, and in the Pahlavi texts it is classed in the much despised “wolf species.”

Jean-Pierre Digard

In western Europe and in North America, what are called “Persian cats” are a breed of longhaired domestic cats with a massive body, measuring 40 to 50 cm in length, and up to 30 cm in the height of their withers. According to the standards, these cats must present a strong bone structure, important muscular masses, and short, straight paws.

Jean-Pierre Digard, Mary Boyce

Multiple Authors

CAUCASUSAND IRAN. The Iranian world is bordered in the northwest by the high mountain barrier of the Caucasus, which separates it from the vast Russian plains beyond. In relief, structure, and ecology the Caucasus constitutes a clear frontier between eastern Europe and western Asia, though it is more closely related to the latter.

Pierre Thorez

The northern side of the range consists of a series of monoclinal folds, in the form of cuestas, with escarpments facing toward the main chain and the more gradual back slopes fanning out into plateaus of varying sizes, all inclining toward the north at angles of from 5 to 15 degrees.

Xin-jiang Rong

Hūšang Aʿlam

ḵāvīar in Persian, the processed non-fertilized roe of sturgeons and some other large fishes, highly valued as a gourmet delicacy. In Iran the roe for caviar is obtained mainly from three species of sturgeon (family Acipenseridae) caught in the southern littoral or fluvial waters of the Caspian Sea.

Ḡolām-Ḥosayn Yūsofī

or ČĀVŪŠ, used in classical Persian texts with the meanings of 1. army commander; 2. master of ceremony or person in charge of the servants; 3. caravan leader; or, more specifically, 4. a guide on the road to Mecca or holy shrines.

Cross-Reference

Daniel Balland and Marcel Bazin

shrub of the genus Camellia and beverage made from its leaves, probably the most popular drink throughout the Iranian world. It is not known when Persians first became acquainted with the beverage. Bīrūnī, in his Ketāb al-ṣaydana, written in the first half of the 11th century, gave some details about the plant čāy and its use as a beverage in China and Tibet.

Pierre Oberling

Ingeborg Luschey-Schmeisser

Safavid royal palace used for coronations and the reception of foreign embassies. It stands in the center of a large garden between the Meydān-e Šāh and the Čahārbāḡ. The layout of these gardens, with three walks shaded by plane trees, dates from the period of Shah ʿAbbās I (r. 1588-1629).

Nancy H. Dupree

palace on a small, terraced hill rising at the southern end of a 30-acre walled garden about six miles south of the city center. According to a commemorative marble plaque at the base of the hill the cornerstone of the palace was laid in 1888, and the palace was completed as a seat for Prince Ḥabīb-Allāh three years later.

Wolfram Kleiss

Kerāmat-Allāh Afsar

(“the forty dervishes,” popularly called Čeltan), a minor takīya (monastery) situated in the northeastern section of Shiraz, a short distance north of the tomb of Ḥāfeẓ and south of Haft Tanān (“the seven dervishes”).

Ḡolām-Ḥosayn Yūsofī

(forty parrot [stories]), the designation of collections of entertaining stories about the wife of a merchant and a pair of parrots, several versions of which are current in Persia and which are derived from older collections called ṭūṭī-nāmas (book of the parrots).

Bruce Lincoln

two homographic neuter substantives čiθra- in Avestan, one meaning “face, appearance,” which is translated in Pahlavi as paydāg, and another rendered in Pahlavi as tōhmag and denoting “origin, lineage,” as well as “seed,” although the latter sense is attested only in compounds.

Mahmoud Omidsalar, Hamid Algar

Cross-Reference

Ṣoḡrā Bāzargān

a popular Persian dish which consists of cooked rice (čelow; see berenj) and a variety of broiled (kabāb, see below) mutton or veal (though less popular) and is served with butter, egg yolk, powdered sumac, raw onions, broiled tomatoes, and fresh sweet basil.

Cross-Reference

Hūšang Aʿlam

the “Oriental plane (tree),” Platanus orientalis L. (fam. Platanaceae). This species is indigenous from southeastern Europe to the Iranian plateau. In Persia proper, spontaneous planes have been observed by botanists. The popularity and wide distribution of cultivated planes as ornamental or shade trees in Persia, especially in gardens and along city streets, are due to several features.

David O. Morgan

(Mong. Chinggis), probably born in 1167 in northeastern Mongolia, d. 1227, founder of the Mongol empire, the most extensive land empire known to history. Čengīz’s achievement, though hardly positive from the point of view of Persia, was by no means wholly a military and a destructive one. In the 1250s, a relatively coherent Mongol kingdom, the Il-khanate, was set up under Čengīz’s grandson Hülegü.

Fīrūz Tawfīq

No census for the purpose of ascertaining the popu­lation and acquiring statistical data was taken in Persia until the present century, but information about num­bers of persons or families was sometimes collected for the purpose of fixing tax dues or conscript quotas. The introduction of systematic census taking in Persia is attributed to Mīrzā Ḥosayn Khan Sepahsālār, the grand vizier from 1871 to 1873 and his enactment of the Reforms Council.

Daniel Balland

The first national census of Afghanistan was not conducted until 1979, but the idea of such a survey had already taken root in the reign of Šēr-ʿAlī Khan (r. 1868-79), when gradual suppression of tax farming in favor of direct collection of taxes by government officials made it imperative for the administration to know the number of taxable households.

C. E. Bosworth

In early Islamic times Persians tended to identify all the lands to the northeast of Khorasan and lying beyond the Oxus with the region of Turan, which in the Šāh-nāma of Ferdowsī is regarded as the land allotted to Ferēdūn’s son Tūr.

Bertold Spuler

Robert D. McChesney

In the 16th-17th centuries Central Asia, includ­ing Transoxania, Greater Balḵ, and Ḵᵛārazm, witnessed a neo-Chingizid (Jochid) political revival, spearheaded by the ʿArabshahid/Shibanid (Shaibanid) lineage in Ḵᵛārazm and the Abulkhairid/Shibanid and Toqay-Timurid lines in Transoxania and Greater Balḵ. In the main, political life was shaped by the neo-Chingizid appanage system of state and its internal dynamic.

Yuri Bregel

Abbas Amanat

The question of Central Asia in the 13th/19th century, from the Persian point of view, was a promi­nent one not only because of Persian territorial claims over Marv, Ḵīva, Saraḵs, and other peripheral regions, but also because of the threat of the Turkmen frontier tribes of Tekka, Yomūt, and Gūklān to the security of Khorasan, Astarābād, and Māzandarān.

Peter B. Golden

Robert D. McChesney

The economy of Central Asia after the fall of Central Asia to the descendants of Čengīz Khan and during their rule was centered on agriculture, but with important contributions from pastoralism, especially the breeding and export of horses.

Ivan M. Steblin-Kamenskij

Gerhard Doerfer

Three Turkish languages came together in Central Asia, the territory covered by the modern Turkmen, Uzbek, Kazakh, Kirghiz, and Tajik SSRs, excluding Chinese Turkestan: 1. the Uighur or Eastern Turks, 2. the Oghuz, speaking Khorasani Turkish, 3. and the Kipchaks

Keith Hitchins

Central Asian literatures in the twentieth century have developed under diverse influences. Beside classical and modern Persian literature and the poetic traditions and folklore of the Central Asian peoples themselves, Rus­sian thought and letters have been predominant.

Walter Feldman

In modern times Central Asia as a musicological unit can be defined as the area extending from Afghanistan north of the Hindu Kush, all of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan in the west, Kirgizia and Chinese Turkestan in the east, and Kazakhstan in the north.

Gernot L. Windfuhr

designation of a number of Iranian dialects spoken in the center of Persia, roughly between Hamadān, Isfahan, Yazd, and Tehran, that is, the area of ancient Media Major, which constitute the core of the western Iranian dialects.

Joseph A. Kechichian

Mahmoud Omidsalar

lamps. Various kinds of lamps were used in Persia before the introduction of electric light. The simplest and cheapest was the čerāḡ-e mūšī “mouse lamp,” so called probably because of its small size and poor light.

Roger M. Savory

b. Shaikh Šarīf, a descendant of Shaikh Zāhed Gīlānī, the celebrated moršed (spiritual director) of Shaikh Ṣafī-al-Dīn, the eponymous founder of the Safavid order (Ṣafawīya); hence Čerāḡ Khan was also known as Pīrzāda.

J. R. Perry

Mahmoud Omidsalar

(also čerāḡān, čerāḡbānī, čerāḡbārān), the decoration of buildings and open spaces with lights during festivals and on occasions like weddings, coronations, royal birthdays, circumcision ceremonies, and so on.

Elham Gheytanchi

(I turn off the lights, Tehran, 2001), the first and most acclaimed novel by Zoya Pirzad (Zoyā Pirzād, b. Abadan, 1952), and the second to be penned by an Iranian-Armenian writer, after Ālice Ārezumāniān’s Hama az yek (All from one,Tehran, 1963).

Mary M. Voigt

The initial occupation of Persian Azerbaijan by farming groups took place in the second half of the 7th millennium B.C.E. The best known site of this period is Hajji Firuz (Ḥājī Fīrūz) Tepe, located in the Ošnū-­Soldūz valley and approximately contemporary with Hasanlu X (ca. 6000-5000 B.C.E.).

Peder Mortensen

Present knowledge of the development of Neolithic ceramics in Luristan and Kurdistan, covering a period from the late 8th millennium to the middle of the 6th millennium B.C.E. is based primarily on evidence from three excavated sites and from surveys carried out southwest of Harsīn, on the Māhī­dašt plain, and in the Holaylān valley.

Elizabeth F. Henrickson

The Zagros Chalcolithic may be divided into Early, Middle, and Late subperiods. Within each several distinctive regional assemblages are known in varying arche­ological detail. Unless otherwise noted all wares are handmade, primarily by means of a variety of slab-­construction techniques; they range from tan to red-buff and are straw-tempered.

Thomas W. Beale

The most fully excavated corpus of ceramics from the Chalcolithic of southern Persia comes from Tal-i Iblis and Tepe Yahya. Ex­tensive surface collections by Sir Mark Aurel Stein in Baluchistan and more recently have provided important supplementary material.

William M. Sumner

Lapui common ware consists of a red paste tempered with rather coarse black grit. It is not as well fired as the fine ware, and frequently the sherds reveal an unoxidized gray core. The common ware breaks with a rough, crumbly edge, compared to the sharp smooth breaks of fine ware.

Robert C. Henrickson

During the 3rd millennium B.C.E. there were two major ceramic traditions in northwestern Persia, a shifting mosaic of ceramic traditions in central western Persia, and polychrome ware was made in the piedmont valleys of northern Susiana.

Elizabeth Carter

The ceramic repertoire of the 2nd millennium B.C.E. in Ḵūzestān is dominated by plain buff-ware forms, the development of which can be traced through approximately 1,000 years, with four major sub­divisions. The most common and long-lived forms are illustrated in this article.

Serge Cleuziou

Archeologists have traditionally linked the ap­pearance of burnished gray wares at Tepe Hissar (Ḥeṣār) and Tureng (Tūrang) Tepe in Gorgān during the second half of the 4th millennium b.c., and their possible diffusion westward in the first half of the 2nd millennium.

Remy Boucharlat and Ernie Haerinck

the distribution pattern of pottery characterized by a wide range of different techniques and styles was quite complex, probably owing to diverse environments that have traditionally been reflected in major differences in the material culture of Persia.

David Whitehouse

Early Islamic pottery has been found in two main regions of Persia: Ḵūzestān and the Persian Gulf and the Persian plateau, including Khorasan. Study of all Islamic pottery of the first four hundred years has been dominated by the finds from Sāmarrā in Meso­potamia.

Ernst J. Grube

A large variety of pottery types from different parts of the country has been attributed to this general period, notably incised and slip-carved earthenwares, which have been published under a variety of labels, as proper attributions have so far been impossible.

Yolande Crowe

ceramics from the Zand, Qajar, and Safavid periods. Although several European travelers to Persia in the 17th century reported active potteries at Shiraz, Mašhad, Yazd, Zarand, and especially Kermān, there are no detailed records that would assist in attributing specific pieces surviving from the rule of the Safavid dynasty (1501­-1732) to any one of them.

Cross-Reference

Filippo Bertotti

Cross-Reference

C. Edmund Bosworth

a small settlement on the north bank of the Harirud and to the south of the Paropamisus range in northwestern Afghanistan, lying approximately 100 miles upstream from Herat in the easternmost part of the modern Herat welāyat or province.

Rüdiger Schmitt

Gerhard Doerfer

Of all the Turkic languages Chaghatay enjoyed by far the greatest prestige. Ebn Mohannā, for instance, characterized it as the purest of all Turkish languages, and the khans of the Golden Horde and of the Crimea, as well as the Kazan Tatars, wrote in Chaghatay much of the time.

Cross-Reference

Elizabeth F. Henrickson

in Persia; chalcolithic is a term adopted for the Near East early in this century as part of an attempt to refine the framework of cultural developmental “stages” (Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages) and used by students of western European prehistory.

Muhammad Dandamayev

Ahmad Ashraf

a national federation of local chambers and syndicates created in Esfand 1348 Š./March 1970 through the merger of various local chambers of commerce and the national chamber of industries and mines of Iran.

Cross-Reference

Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak and Estelle Whelan

(1750-ca. 1813), English poet and translator. His three books devoted to Persian litera­ture were all first published in India. The earliest contains English odes in imitation of the poems of Ḥāfeẓ, mostly on the theme of wine and drinking. The second is an abridged excerpt of the Šāh-nāma, apparently the first of a projected series of volumes, in rhymed couplets and iambic pentameter. The third work consists of a series of essays in verse after the manner of Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Criticism.”

Mary Boyce and Firoze M. Kotwal

John Hansman

(Spasinou) in pre-Islamic times; Characene is the name Pliny gives for the later region of Mesene (called Mēšān or Mēšūn in Middle Persian, Maysān/Mayšān in Syriac, and Maysān in Arabic) in southernmost Mesopotamia, which formed a political district of that name in the Seleucid, Parthian, and Sasanian periods.

William W. Malandra

Maria Macuch; John R. Hinnells, Mary Boyce, and Shahrokh Shahrokh

(MPers. ruwānagān lit. “relating to the soul”), pious endow­ments to benefit the souls of the dead, as specified by the individual founders. i. In the Sasanian period. ii. Among Zoroastrians in Islamic times.

Werner Sundermann

Daniel Balland

In Persia and Afghanistan both nomadic pastoralists and sedentary peasants make the same basic kinds of domestic cheese. The only clear distinction is between acid and rennet cheeses (for the technical basis of this distinction see Ramet), both made from mixed milks, except in Gīlān; there acid cheeses are usually prepared from cow’s and buffalo’s milk and rennet cheeses from ewe’s and goat’s milk, which has higher fat content.

Multiple Authors

Jenny Rose

The Zoroastrian community has traditionally regarded marriage as having a threefold function: to propagate the human race, to spread the Zoroastrian faith, and to contribute to the victory of the good cause. The birth of a child furthers each of these objec­tives.

Mansour Shaki

Although the corpus of Sasanian civil law was designed primarily to regulate matters among the lower classes, that is, the common people and slaves, the portions on adop­tion, inheritance, guardianship, and the like were equally applicable to the upper classes.

Shirin Ebadi

A person is consid­ered a minor (ṣaḡīr) until he or she has attained the physical and psychological growth necessary for full participation in society. When a child has reached the age of maturity (bolūḡ) determined by the law he ir she is consid­ered mature (bāleḡ).

Erika Friedl

The topic of child rearing (from birth to social adulthood in the mid-teens) is largely neglected in systematic research; there are no comparative studies of child-rearing practices among different ethnic and cultural groups in the country and only a few specialized studies.

Janet Kestenberg Amighi

In the first half of the 13th/20th century most children were born at home with the assistance of the midwife. Immediately after birth the infant was bathed to cleanse it of polluting substances and wrapped in pieces of cloth called landog.

EIr

Up to the Constitutional movement the standard curriculum of traditional Persian elementary schools (maktabs), which were pri­vately operated, included the alphabet, the Koran, selec­tions from popular Persian poetry and prose, and the traditional sciences. Beside textbooks children read edifying and entertaining stories drawn from Persian classics.

Philippe Gignoux

Greek title of one of the chief offices of state in Achaemenid Persia, presumably translated from Old Persian hazārapati-, attested in Greek as azarapateîs, explained as eisaggeleîs, that is, announcers or ushers.

Victor Mair and Prods Oktor Skjærvø

In antiquity the Tarim and Dzungar (Zungar, Jungar) basins lay at the crossroads of three main Eurasian routes including the Southern Silk Road, the Northern Silk Road, and a northern route passing between the Bogdo-ola (Bo-ko-tuo) range and the Tien Shans.

Morris Rossabi

On the eve of the Mongol conquests the eastern oases were inhabited by the Uighur Turks. The eastern oases south of the Takla Makan were controlled by the Tangut. The western portion of the Tarim basin was inhabited by a mixture of Turkic and Iranian peoples, many of whom were Muslims.

Isenbike Togan

Although an indigenous Muslim and non-Muslim Turkic literature is attested in eastern Turkestan from an early period, the earliest surviving works embodying the historical traditions of the Chaghatayids in the 16th century are in Persian.

Kim Ho-Dong

Between the late 17th and 19th centuries many Iranian-speaking peoples from Šeḡnān (Shughnan) and Wāḵān (Wakhan) migrated to the region of the eastern Pamirs around Lake Zorkul, and mingled with the nomadic groups of Iranian descent already established there.

Samuel Lieu

Gerhard Doerfer

Contacts between the Iranian peoples and the Turks occurred at least as early as 552 C.E., when the Turks spread from their northern settlements and established an empire extending from the Greater Khingan mountains to the Aral Sea and Sogdians farther west.

Multiple Authors

Edwin G. Pulleyblank

Contact between China and Iran was initiated toward the end of the 2nd century B.C.E. by the envoy Chang Ch’ien (Zhang Qian), who searched for the Yüeh-chih (Yue-zhi), a people that had migrated from the borders of China after having been defeated by the Hsiung-nu (Xiongnu).

Liu Yingsheng and Peter Jackson

The incorporation of Persia into a vast empire that extended as far as China, following the conquests of Čengīz (Chinggis) Khan (602-24/1206-27) and his grandson Hülegü (Hūlāgū; 654-63/1256-65), inaugurated an era of intense contact between Persia and China.

Daniel Balland

Throughout history China and Afghanistan shared a certain amount of trade, mostly tea and fruit, via the direct caravan route from Chinese Turkestan across the high passes of the Pamirs and the Wāḵān corridor to northern Afghanistan.

Chen Da-Sheng

Chinese authorities granted the foreign merchant communities in the major port cities a certain amount of autonomy in internal affairs and that they regulated themselves according to patterns familiar in their homelands.

EIr

The earliest Persian inscription in China is the tombstone of the Zoroastrian Ma (Pahl. *Māhnūš), wife of General Su-liang (Pahl. Farroxzād; Humbach), inscribed in both Pahlavi and Chinese and dated 874, has been discovered at Xi-an, the capital of Shan-xi province.

Toh Sugimura

In the Chinese cultural sphere Persian artistic influence was at its peak under the Tang dynasty (618-906 c.e.), contemporary with the end of the Sasanian period (30/651) and the first centuries after the Islamic conquest.

Étienne de la Vaissière

There are two different stages in the history of Eastern Iranian migrations to China: the first, still extremely obscure, is dominated by Bactrian immigrants, coming from Bactriana and the Kushan empire, and the second, from the fourth to the ninth century CE is dominated by Sogdians.

M. L. Carter

Aspects of the artistic taste in personal adornment of these and other similar nomadic tribal confederations of northeast Asia, often labeled “animal style,” can be seen in the late 1st-millennium Chinese decorative metalwork, often gilded and inlaid with silver and colored stones.

Wolfgang Felix

Cross-Reference

Nigel J. R. Allan, Georg Buddruss

The Chitral river drains the eastern Hindu Kush in the north and a spur of the Hindu Raj on the south and east. With its deeply incised bed and braided stream channels it constitutes the upper tract of the Kunar (Konar), which debouches into the Kabul river, a tributary of the Indus.

Philip Kohl

Chlorite ranges in color from light gray to deep green and darkens when exposed to fire; it was highly valued during certain prehistoric periods. Elaborate stone ves­sels carved with repeating designs, both geometric and naturalistic, in an easily recognizable “intercultural style,” were made primarily of chlorite.

Rüdiger Schmitt

Charles Melville and ʿAbbās Zaryāb

Although at first the Chobanids maintained the fiction that they were vassals of the ruling house of Hülegü (Hūlāgū), after the collapse of Il-khanid authority they became effectively independent rulers of the areas that they were able to seize. It is possible to identify four different phases in the history of the Chobanids.

Jean Calmard

(b. 30 August 1804, in Krzywicze, Poland [now in the Lithuanian S.S.R.], d. Noisy-le-Sec, near Paris, 19 December 1891), Polish poet and diplomat, the first European scholar to work on Persian folklore.

Xavier De Planhol, Daniel Balland

It is possible to extrapolate some general conclusions about the routes by which cholera reached Persia. It arrived three times via Afghanistan, three times overland from the west, only twice through the Persian Gulf (the second time without spreading to the plateau), and perhaps once across the Caspian.

C. E. Bosworth

The Islamic history of Ḵᵛārazm begins with the two invasions of Arab troops under the governor of Khorasan Qotayba b. Moslem Bāhelī in 93/712, who intervened in the region on the pretext of internecine strife among members of the native Afrighid dynasty of ḵᵛārazmšāhs

D. N. MacKenzie

Old Chorasmian was written in an indigenous script descended from the Aramaic, brought to the region by the administration of the Achaemenid empire and characterized by heter­ography, that is, the occasional writing of Aramaic words to represent the corresponding Chorasmian.

B. I. Vainberg

In the mid-19th century, coins that had been found in Russia and showed certain similarities to Indo-Parthian and Kushan coinages were for the first time identified as Chorasmian. In 1938, Sergei P. Tolstov (1907-76), who had conducted preliminary archeological fieldwork in the lower basin of the Oxus river, accepted this interpretation.

Jes P. Asmussen

Multiple Authors

This article treats Christianity in pre-Islamic Persia as seen through literary sources and material remains, in Central Asia, in Christian literature in Middle Iranian languages, in Manicheism, and in Persian literature. It also covers Christina influences in Persian poetry and Christian missions in Persia.

James R. Russell

In Middle Persian there are three terms used for Christians: KLSTYDʾN and NʾCLʾY in the inscription on the Kaʿba-ye Zardošt of the 3rd-century Zoroastrian high priest Kartir; and tarsāq, Sogdian loan-word trsʾq, New Persian tarsā.

Judith Lerner

Although Christians may have been among the deportees from Roman Syria who worked on the monuments of Šāpūr I (240-70 c.e.) at Bīšāpūr (q.v.) and the dam at Šūštar, nothing identifiably Christian has been excavated in Persia itself.

Nicholas Sims-Williams

The main early centers of Syriac-speaking Christians were Edessa and Arbela. By the end of the 3rd century the Syrian church was strongly established also in the western Persian empire, where it was sometimes harshly persecuted during the following centuries under Sasanian rule.

Nicholas Sims-Williams

In Persia itself Syriac eventually regained its status as the sole literary and liturgical language of the church, with the result that none of this Christian Persian literature survived, apart from a few texts preserved in Syriac translation, such as two legal works by the metropolitans Išoʿbōḵt and Simon.

Annemarie Schimmel

Persian poetry contains a good number of allusions to Jesus Christ (ʿĪsā Masīḥ), Mary (Maryam), and Christians (naṣārā, tarsā) in general. Most of the images and ideas expressed in poetry are elaborations of the Koranic data about Jesus and his virgin mother, though sometimes developed very ingeniously.

Yahya Armajani

Christianity was introduced in Persia in the Parthian period, and several bishoprics were established there. That the Persian church was itself active in proselytizing abroad at the end of the Sasanian period (224-651) and immediately after is clear from remains in India and China.

Raḥmat-Allāh Ostovār

Peter Kawerau

a Syriac church history of Adiabene, written in the 6th century by Mĕšīḥā-Zĕḵā under the title Kĕtaḇā ḏ-ĕqlisyastīqī ḏă-Mĕšīḥā-Zĕḵā, chosen in conscious imitation of the Ekklēsiastikḕ historía by Eusebius of Caesarea. A remarkable account from the Parthian period is that of the Feast of the Magi in the month of Iyyār. Equally noteworthy is the account of the fall of the Arsacids and the beginning of the reign of the Sasanians in 224.

Cross-Reference

Cross-reference

Marcel Bazin and Christian Bromberger

There are three distinct ways in which milk is normally processed. In the first it is heated, pressed, and squeezed dry to make cheese (panīr). Cheese making is uncommon in the Persian world, except in a few regions where it has become a specialty. The other two methods begin with conversion of the milk into yogurt.

Cross-Reference

Rüdiger Schmitt

Cross-Reference

Michael Weiskopf

as a source for Parthian history; letters written by Roman statesman and political philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 b.c.e.) preserve a virtually unique con­temporary extra-Iranian source on Parthian military and diplomatic activities and the Roman response to them, particularly during the military-campaign season of 51­-50 b.c.e.

Mansour Shaki

(Selected precepts of the ancient sages), a post-Sasanian compendium of apothegms intended to instruct every Zoroastrian male, upon his attaining the age of fifteen years, in fundamental religious and ethical principles, as well as in the daily duties incumbent upon him.

Farrokh Gaffary

Regularly scheduled film screenings were introduced in Tehran by Ārdāšes Batmāngarīān, known as Ardašīr Khan, who had worked at Pathé in Paris at the turn of the century and had brought back to Persia the cinematograph, the phonograph, and the bicycle.

Jamsheed Akrami

Hamid Naficy

Be­fore World War I most Persian documentaries were sponsored and viewed only by the Qajar ruling family and the upper classes. They were apparently technically primitive and in a simple narrative format, consisting of footage of news events, topics of current interest, and spectacles, usually filmed in long shot.

Priscilla Soucek

Aḥmad Tafażżolī

traditionally thought to mean “the bridge of the separator” but recently shown to be “the bridge of the accumulator/collector,” the name of a bridge that, according to a Mazdayasnian/Zoroastrian eschatological myth, leads from this world to the next and must be crossed by the souls of the departed.

Cross-Reference

Jennifer M. Scarce

Multiple Authors

i. Geographical introduction. ii. City planning, construction, and architecture. See Supplement. iii. Administration and social organization. iv. Modern urbanization and modernization in Persia. v. Modern urbanization and modernization in Afghanistan.

Xavier De Planhol

There is a long history of settlement on Persian territory, where urban life was firmly established in antiquity, and cities continued to proliferate, though, owing to fluctuations in the population, they were highly unstable.

Eckart Ehlers

Over a period of decades the rapidly growing popula­tion of Persia has simultaneously become increasingly urbanized. More and more people live in increasingly larger cities, and the largest cities tend to grow at a rate above the average.

Erwin Grötzbach

Since 1359 Š./1980 the flight of millions of Afghans, not only out of the country but also to relatively secure cities like Kabul and Mazār-e Šarīf, has been reflected in a sharp increase in the level of urbanization.

Multiple Authors

Prods Oktor Skjærvø

The evidence for the existence of a highly developed class structure in the community in which the Avestan texts were composed is very slight, and the available information must be culled from sources chronologically as far apart as the Avesta itself and the Pahlavi texts.

Pierre Briant

There are strong grounds for supposing that, for some purposes at least, Persians still defined their class structure in terms of the ancient Iranian social divisions outlined in parts of the Avesta, where individuals are classified by basic function as priests, warriors, and farmers.

Mansour Shaki

The scant and fragmentary information available on the Parthian period does not permit a comprehensive descrip­tion of social structure; in fact, the vast but decentralized empire encompassed a variety of social structures.

Ahmad Ashraf and Ali Banuazizi

A new social stratification and conception of inequality seems to have gradually emerged under the influence of: (1) Islamic ideals of equality and merit; (2) pre-Islamic Persian and Arabian ideals and practices of social inequality; and above all (3) rivalries among social groups over wealth, prestige, and power.

Ahmad Ashraf and Ali Banuazizi

During the Qajar period there continued to be a fundamental division between a narrow stratum of courtiers, state officials, tribal leaders, religious notables, landlords and great merchants at the top and the vast majority of peasants, tribespeople, and laborers in agriculture, traditional industries, and services at the bottom.

Ahmad Ashraf and Ali Banuazizi

The major social classes on the eve of the revolution of 1979 were the dominant strata, composed of professionals and bureaucrats and the bourgeoisie; the middle and lower-middle white-collar urban strata, the traditional middle and lower-middle classes, the extremely heterogeneous working classes, and the agrarian classes, comprising petty landowners, peasants, and landless agricultural workers.

Multiple Authors

Mary Boyce

Cleansing is conceived as a cosmic and individual activity is an essential element in Zoroastrianism, which teaches that the assault of the Evil Spirit, Angra Mainyu, brings defilement on all the good creations of Ahura Mazdā and that they, in their struggle for salvation, must ceaselessly strive to rid themselves of it.

Hamid Algar

The identification of unclean objects (najāsāt) and of the factors or agents that, within certain limits, may cleanse them (moṭahherāt) depends more on the interpretation of prophetic tradition and on juristic deduc­tion than it does on clear Koranic injunctions.

Rüdiger Schmitt

Marie Louise Chaumont

(Titus Flavius Clemens, probably b. Athens ca. 150 C.E., d. Cappadocia ca. 215), Greek convert to Christianity who became the leading theologian of his time, a polemicist particularly noted for his attempts to reconcile Greco-Roman thought with Christian teachings.

Marie Louise Chaumont

the unknown author of a work of fiction falsely ascribed to Pope Clement I (88-­97 CE) and now generally known as the Pseudo­-Clementines, which contains passages reflecting myths and teachings of Persian origin.

Cross-reference

Eckart Ehlers

The Persian national weather service first began publishing its observations only in the year 1956, when a network of synoptic observation stations was first constructed in confor­mity with international standards; detailed data for many parts of the country are thus available for only about twenty-five or thirty years.

Lutz Richter-Bernburg

Multiple Authors

(Ar. and Pers. lebās, Pers. pūšāk, jāma, raḵt). The articles in this series are devoted to clothing of the Iranian peoples in successive historical periods and of various regions and ethnic groups in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Iran.

EIr

Of the twenty-seven subsequent articles in this series eleven are devoted to clothing of the Iranian peoples in successive historical periods and fourteen to modern clothing of various regions and ethnic groups in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Persia. The remaining two are compilations of terminology for various types of garment in these settings.

Shapur Shahbazi

Several overgarments were associ­ated with court dress. The vest was worn by Darius the Great, the Persepolitan monster-slaying hero, and the Persian and Elamite throne bearers represented on the tombs. It had vertical pleats and, being sleeveless, left the wearer free to move quickly.

Trudi Kawami

The Parthian period, when the Arsacid dynasty ruled, or claimed to rule, Persia, was the period in which trousers and sleeved coats became common garb throughout the Near East. These garments, the direct ancestors of modern dress, crossed political and ethnic boundaries and were worn from northern India to Syria, continuing Achaemenid styles.

Elsie H. Peck

Variation of the veiled tunic is seen on a series of silver-gilt vases and ewers depicting female dancers and generally dated to the 5th and 6th centuries. In these images the veil, instead of being worn over the shoulder, is draped below the hips, with its ends wrapped around the arms.

Gerd Gropp

Modern knowledge of the dress of the eastern Iranian peoples is derived from literary and archeological sources, which can be compared, though with caution. Although there were regional differences, as well as a broad change over time, on the whole the costume remained fairly uniform.

Aleksandr Naymark

The most common type of male outer garment was a caftan with long, tapered sleeves; a round neck; and slits on the sides of the skirt. The neckline, lapels, cuffs, hem, and side slits were trimmed with fabric of another pattern. The caftan was worn belted, and the neck was probably fastened with a single button.

S. A. Yatsenko

Both sexes wore caftans open in front (kurta), trou­sers, and a tunic with a round neck opening and long side slits, convenient for riding horses. The Scythian caftan was constructed of two pieces of cloth stitched at the shoulders and at the sides and hemmed. The front normally did not fasten but was wrapped to the left.

Elsie H. Peck

There is evidence that styles of the late Sasanian period in Persia continued to be worn for some time after the Islamic conquest. The costume worn by “Bahrām Gōr” in a relief from the same site probably reflects that of a man of high rank.

Eleanor Sims

The few Mongol and Timurid garments that survive almost all come from tombs; they reveal more about material and weaves, designs and colors, than about cut. For ex­ample, a silk-and-gold lampas fabric, the “ṭerāz of Abū Saʿīd,” used for the burial of Rudolf IV, was not made up into a garment before its export to the West.

Layla S. Diba

Pictorial sources for both the Safavid and Qajar periods provide a comprehensive survey of costume types and are thus an important tool, as long as it is remembered that Persian painting is often idealized and standardized (see ix, above). Nevertheless, in these periods it was usually correct in essentials, for great care was taken to render decorative details accurately.

ʿAlī-Akbar Saʿīdī Sīrjānī

Office workers and other urban residents who favored modernity gradually adopted the sardārī, trousers, and even on occasion Western suits. Among Europeans photographed at the ceremonies inaugurating telegraph service in Tehran on 26 April 1926 were women wearing jackets, skirts, and hats and engineers wearing brimmed hats.

Nancy Hatch Dupree

The most diagnostic item of clothing is headgear; and even the ubiquitous turban (Pers. langōtā, dastār, Pashto paṭkay, pagṛi), which can vary in length from 3 to 6 m, takes on distinguishing characteristics, depending on the arrangement of folds.

Klaus Ferdinand

In the 1950s Hazāra women made all the family clothing, and they also wove barrak on a horizontal loom of a type common in Afghanistan. Cotton is cultivated in the warmer southern part of Hazārajāt, for example, in Šahrestān (formerly Sepāy) in Dāy Zangī and farther south in Orūzgān and Jāḡūrī; profes­sional male weavers make the traditional cotton cloth called karbās on a loom of a type found extensively in southern and western Asia.

Guzel’ Maĭtdinova

The most common traditional garment is a straight dress, widening at the bottom, worn over trousers. The long, full sleeves generally cover the hands, though in some mountain regions sleeves are closely fitted to the wrists. Another type of dress is cut straight, with a yoke and inset sleeves.

Shirin Mohseni and Peter Andrews

In western Azerbaijan Mahābād is the main urban center for the Kurds Women there wear balloon-shaped trousers (darpe), 4-6 m wide, fitted at the ankles, and a long pleated dress (kerās), 4-5 m wide, with a round neck­line and long sleeves that terminate in triangular projections (sorānis) at least a meter long, which are wrapped around the wrists.

Ora Shwartz-Beeri

Everyday men’s clothes were made from handwoven sheep’s wool. Suits for weddings and other festive occasions were of handwoven mohair. These suits were embellished with embroi­dery. According to infor­mants, expensive fabrics for women’s and children’s clothes were also handmade of wild silk, from worms that feed on oak trees in the region.

Iran Ala Firouz and Mehremonīr Jahānbānī

The basic garments are variations of the traditional and tribal costume characteristic of Persia as a whole: a long, loose robe with a round neckline, a slit down the center of the bodice, and long, wide sleeves tapering toward the wrists, worn over a chemise and wide trousers narrowing at the ankles and with a drawstring at the waist.

Pamela Hunte

There is some variation in apparel among tribes, especially in specific embroidery designs and in the terminology applied to garments and embroidery patterns. The northern tribes wear heavier clothing as protection in the colder climate. Despite these differences, however, there is a basic style of clothing that can be identified as that of present-day Baluch.

Ḥosayn-ʿAlī Beyhaqī

The male costume includes either a tasseled black cap, around which a shawl is wrapped; a hood woven of black lamb’s wool, which covers the head from above the eyebrows to the neck; a traveling hood, which covers the face, with an opening for the eyes; or a hat made of lambskin.

P. A. Andrews And M. Andrews

In Azerbaijan as a whole the traditional costume, now worn largely in a tribal context, retains the form of garments as they were at the end of the 19th century; it is only among Kurdish, rather than Turkic, men that elements have survived the reforms of Reżā Shah in everyday wear.

Christian Bromberger

In several aspects the traditional dress (Gīlaki lebās; Ṭāleši ḵalā) of Gīlān and Māzandarān bears a struc­tural resemblance to that of other rural regions of Persia. It is constructed in successive layers, often of similar pieces superimposed, like women’s skirts or men’s shirts in winter.

R. Shahnaz Nadjmabadi

The people on the shores of the Persian Gulf are divided among three provinces, each with a distinctive style of dress: Ḵūzestān, Būšehr, and Hormozgān. The last is the main focus here. Women’s clothing consists of four basic parts: head covering, dress, trousers, and shoes. The normal head covering is a rectangular black scarf of thin silk (maknā) wrapped round the head and fastened on top with a metal pin (čollāba).

Lois Beck

In the 19-20th centuries the Qašqāʾī constituted a tribal confederacy of people of ethnolinguistically diverse origin; they were predominantly nomadic pastoralists who migrated seasonally between the low­lands and the highlands in the southern Zagros mountains. They created their own distinctive dress from market-derived goods and the work of village and urban craft specialists.

Jean-Pierre Digard

Members of the Lori-speaking ethnic groups, including the Lors themselves, the Baḵtīārīs, and the Boīr-Aḥmadīs are characterized by similar styles of dress, with variations reflecting differences in tribe and social class of the wearer, variations that can have strong symbolic meaning, particularly among the Baḵtīārīs.

P. A. Andrews

Until the 1970s the clothing and jewelry of the Turkmen formed the most elaborate tribal costume still used in Persia. The principal women’s garment is a shift (köynek), formerly of silk, now replaced by synthetic fibers; a raspberry red was common in the hand-woven material, sometimes with shot effects.

Cross-Reference

Cross-Reference

Willem M. Floor

Ordinary Per­sians claimed that, as they could not burn coal in their water pipes, they had no need of it. Only Europeans living in Tehran and Tabrīz used coal for heating; they collected it from the surface in bas­kets.

Cross-Reference

Hūšang Aʿlam

C. Edmund Bosworth

It is likely that substitution ciphers were used by early Persian states, for nearly identical versions were still in use in Qajar Persia. During the reigns of Fatḥ-ʿAlī Shah and Moḥammad Shah (1834-48) the minister Abu’l-Qāsem Qāʾemmaqām devised a number of letter-substitution codes for communicating with different princes and viziers.

D. N. MacKenzie

a manuscript of eighty-two paper leaves, measuring approximately 20 x 14 cm, preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale of the cathe­dral of San Marco in Venice and comprising princi­pally vocabularies and texts of the Northwest Middle Turkic language of the Cumans, or Komans, recorded in Latin script.

Jes P. Asmussen

forty-three Avestan and Pahlavi codices acquired by Rasmus Kristian Rask (1787-1832) in Bombay, India, and Niels Ludvig Westergaard (1815-1878) in Persia, all originally de­posited in the library of the University of Copenhagen but later transferred to the Royal Library.

ʿAlī Āl-e Dawūd

Cross-Reference

Abbas Alizadeh

Čoḡā Bonut is important because it has provided evidence of the earliest stages of settled agricultural life in Ḵuzestān. It is a small mound; in its truncated and artificially rounded state it has a diameter of about 50 m and rises just over 5 m above the surrounding plain.

Helene J. Kantor

Čoḡā Mīš was occupied continuously, except for one or two presumably short breaks, from approximately the late 6th millennium to the late 4th millennium b.c.e. and must have played a key role in the cultural and social development of the region.

Frank Hole

Čoḡā Safīd is a prehistoric site on the Dehlorān (Deh Luran) plain, dating back to the 8th millennium b.c.e. Excavation of a step trench in 1969 uncovered six archeological phases representing some 1,500 years of occupation, but there remain deposits as yet unexcavated, which continue to the end of the 4th millennium.

Elizabeth Carter

or Chogha Zanbil, a city founded by the Elamite king Untaš Napiriša (ca. 1275-40 B.C.E.) about 40 km southeast of Susa at a strategic point on a main road leading to the highlands. After his death it remained a place of religious pilgrimage and a burial ground until about 1000 B.C.E.

Cross-Reference

Jean During

Multiple Authors

During the reign of Fatḥ-ʿAlī Shah (1797-1834) the first steps toward a modern currency were taken. At the Tabrīz and Isfahan mints well-executed silver and gold coins were struck along with the normal, less carefully minted products, with full, even pressure and reeded edges similar to those found on contemporary British Indian coins. It is unclear whether these coins were intended only for presentation or as prototypes for a technically superior circulating coinage,

Fridrik Thordarson

ancient Greek name of the region at the eastern end of the Black Sea and south of the Caucasus mountains, corresponding to the Georgian provinces of Imeretia, Mingrelia (Samegrelo), Guria and Ač’ara and the Pontic regions of northeastern Turkey.

Adriano Rossi

(b. Trieste, 1928, d. Rome, 1985), Italian scholar of Iranian languages and general oriental subjects, co-author with his wife, Hanne Grünbaum, of the most comprehensive Persian-Italian dictionary (1978) published in modern times.

Cross-reference

Werner Sundermann

or Codex Manichaicus Coloniensis, a lump of parchment fragments the size of a matchbox, containing a portion of the life and teachings of Mani, discovered in 1969 at an indeterminate spot in the area of Asyūṭ (ancient Lycopolis) in upper Egypt, the smallest ancient codex known to date.

Annemarie Schimmel, Priscilla P. Soucek

Wolfram Kleiss

one of several kinds of upright, load-bearing architectural members encompassed, along with piers, in the term sotūn. In the Achaemenid palaces at Persepolis and Susa columns, whether plain or fluted, reached a height of 19 m and a diameter up to 1.60 m; they were topped by double-protome capitals, themselves an additional 8 m high.

Cross-Reference

Michael Weiskopf

the portion of southwestern Asia Minor (modern Turkey) bordered on the east by the Euphrates river, on the west by the Taurus mountains, and on the south by the plains of northern Syria. It was part of the Achaemenid empire and its successor kingdoms and did not achieve status as an independent kingdom until the mid-2nd century B.C.E.

Muhammad A. Dandamayev

The longest of many caravan routes was the Royal Road, which stretched for nearly 2,400 km from Sardis in Asia Minor through Mesopotamia and down the Tigris to Susa; stations with service facilities were located every 25-30 km along its length.

Bertold Spuler

There were no centers of trade of supraregional importance in either Persia or Central Asia during the Middle Ages. In the Islamic world Baghdad, the seat of the caliphate, was the primary center for the exchange of goods, which arrived overland or by sea through the port of Baṣra at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Willem Floor

The Dutch and English East Indies companies were the first well-capitalized trading partners established in Persia, initially providing a much-needed source of cash for the shahs. In return the companies demanded and obtained treaties (in 1617 and 1623) granting them freedom of trade, exemption from duties and various other charges, and even extraterritorial rights.

Vahid Nowshirvani

A prominent feature of Persian export trade was the steady rise in both the value and volume of oil shipments through almost the entire Pahlavi period until the Revolution, when this trend was reversed. Because of the large increase in price in 1352 Š./1973 the value of Persian oil exports climbed substantially more than the volume in the 1970s. Other exports fared less well.

Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi and ʿAlī Mohammadi

the growth of post, telegraph, and telephone service in Persia was closely linked with the growth of railway and highway networks and other modern transportation systems; it was thus a central element in the development of a modern infrastructure in Persia.

Torāb Ḥaqšenās

Whereas in the previous period Persian communism had been embodied primarily in the Tudeh party, which followed the ideological and political dicta of the Soviet Union, after the coup d’etat of 1332 Š./1953 it was characterized by ideological and organizational diversity.

Anthony Arnold

The Afghan Communist party, Ḥezb-e demōkrātīk-e ḵalq-e Afḡānestān (People’s democratic party of Afghanistan, P.D.P.A.) was officially founded in 1344 Š./1965, at a time when political parties were illegal in Afghanistan. Two other durable Afghan Marxist-Leninist groups were active in the same general period.

Cross-Reference

Afshin Matin-Asgari

(Konfederāsīūn-e jahānī-e moḥaṣṣelīn wa dānešjūyān-e īrānī etteḥādīya-ye mellī), an organization purporting to be the political and corporate (ṣenfī) representative of Persian students abroad, as well as in Persia, during the 1960s and 1970s.

Cross-reference

D. N. MacKenzie

Nowhere in the Gathas of Zoroaster or the Old Persian inscriptions of the Achaemenids are even individual stars mentioned. The first and only two constellations to be named in Old Iranian sources are Ursa Major and the Pleiades, in the Younger Avesta. The next possible mentions of constellations are of two kinds, both dating from late Middle Persian times but only actually attested in works or manuscripts from the Islamic period.

Said Amir Arjomand

After the overthrow of the Pahlavi monarchy in 1979, Persia was declared an Islamic republic. Until that time there had been virtually no discussion, outside religious circles, of the conception of welāyat-e faqīh (lit. “mandate of the jurist”) propounded by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. During the revolutionary turmoil of 1978-79, only the vaguer notion of “Islamic government” was current.

Abbas Amanat

Vanessa Martin

After 1308/1890 the Persian government found itself in increasing financial difficulties, as inflation produced a sharp decline in the value of the land tax and the silver qerān lost value against the pound sterling with the rapid fall of international silver prices at the end of the 19th century.

ʿAlī-Akabr Saʿīdī Sīrjānī

There are no statistics on literacy in Qajar Persia, but it can be conjectured that the literate population was very small. Until the beginning of the Pahlavi era there were people who could “read” the Koran and prayer books, for teaching in religious schools consisted of memorizing koranic passages.

Wolfram Kleiss

The most frequent building material in Iranian cultural areas has always been mud, which is available everywhere. When wet, it can simply be plastered on walls without shaping. Alternatively, it can be tempered and formed into large blocks with more or less rectangular sides.

Willem Floor

In 1933, Iran’s first cement production plant, the state-owned company Simān-e Ray (100 tons per day), became operational. The cement factory in Ray had only 360 workers in 1936, but after its expansion in 1939 to a capacity of 300 tons per day it had 1,000 workers. Its output did not suffice to satisfy domestic demand.

Multiple Authors

Gherardo Gnoli

Although modern Zoroastrians question whether their religion even allows conversion, Zoroastrianism, as an ethical and essentially monotheistic religion based on a historical figure, originally had pronounced missionary characteristics, as is clear from the extent of its dissemination.

Juan Cole

Amnon Netzer

In the Achaemenid, Seleucid, and Parthian periods relations between the Jews and the Persian authorities were friendly, and there is no evidence of forced or voluntary conversion of Jews to Zoroastrianism.

Juan R. I. Cole

In 1279/1863 the prominent Babi Bahāʾ-Allāh, while in exile in Baghdad, had declared himself to a very small group of close disciples and relatives as the messianic figure (man yoẓheroho ʾllāh) whose advent had been pre­dicted by Sayyed ʿAlī-Moḥammad Šīrāzī, the Bāb.

Pargol Saati

Modern Zoroastrians disagree on whether it is permissible for outsiders to enter their religion. Now scattered in small minority communities in Persia, India, Europe, and North America and without a reli­gious hierarchy, the Zoroastrians are governed by councils and high priests whose authority is only local.

Mohammad R. Ghanoonparvar

classical, in Persian; relatively few books in Persian exclusively devoted to the prepa­ration of food are known, even though references to a highly developed cuisine in Persia in premodern times are found in medical, religious, historical, and poetic texts.

Ṣoḡrā Bāzargān

(kolūča, nān-e kolūča, kolīča) in Persia; in this article the cookies most frequently made in major Persian cities today, both traditional types and those reflecting foreign influence, will be described.

Robert H. Dyson, Jr.

Amir I. Ajami

(šerkat-e taʿāwonī), economic organizations owned jointly by and operated for the benefit of groups of individuals. Such cooperatives were first introduced and recognized in Persia under the Commercial code (Qānūn-e tejārat) of 1303 Š./1924, which provided for both production (tawlīd) and consumer (maṣraf) cooperatives.

James W. Allan and Willem Floor

Manṣur Qorbāni and Anuširavān Kani

With the advancement of the knowledge of metallurgy in the Achaemenid era, finely crafted copper and bronze objects were created, continuing on through ancient times. The medieval Arab traveler Abu Dolaf wrote about the Nišāpur copper mine, but the extent of the deposits in Iran became known only from accounts of European travelers from the Safavid period onwards.

Aloïs van Tongerloo

Karīm Emāmī

(ḥaqq-e moʾallef), a direct translatof the French droit d'auteur; the exclusive right to reproduce, publish, and sell the matter or form of a created work, for example, a novel or musical compo­sition.

Hūšang Aʿlam

A. Shapur Shahbazi

Mary Boyce

disposal of, in Zoroastrianism; in Zoroastrianism the corpse of a righteous believer was held to be the greatest source of pollution in the world, as the death of such a one represented a triumph for evil, whose forces were thought to be gathered there in strength.

Hashem Rajabzadeh

In this article the parts of the Persian letter are surveyed section by section, with comments on the general features, style, and stock formulas characteris­tic of each from early Islamic times to the present.

Momin Mohiuddin

The chancellery of official and diplomatic correspondence was an organ of Indian Muslim political organization. At various times it was known as dīvān-­e resālat,dīvānal-enšāʾ, dīvānal-rasāʾel, or dār al-­enšāʾ.

Roger Beck

That Mithraism had an elaborate cosmology, central to its doctrines, is proven first by the structure of its cult shrines (mithraea), which took the form of caves (real or artificial) because, as Porphyry (6) stated, the cave is an “image of the cosmos.” For this reason mithraea were equipped with “symbols of the cosmic elements and climates set at appropriate intervals.”

Werner Sundermann

Werner Sundermann

The most important source for modern knowledge of Mazdakite cosmogony is the description of the Mazdakite religion in Ketāb al-melal wa’l-neḥal, writ­ten by Abu’l-Fatḥ Moḥammad b. ʿAbd-al-Karīm Šahrestānī, in 624/1227, several hundred years after the period in which the sect flourished.

Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi

Imami traditions contain a chaotic abundance of material portraying the origin and structure of the universe. Book XIV, “On the heavens and the earth,” of Moḥammad-Bāqer Majlesī’s Beḥār al-anwār, fills ten volumes (LVII-LXVI) in the most recent edition and contains several thousand traditions.

Denis M. MacEoin

It is in some respects redundant to speak of a “Shaikhi cosmology” distinct from that of Imami Shiʿism as a whole. Shaikhi ideas never developed independently of ordinary Shiʿite thought but were either part of it or in dialogue or conflict with it.

Moojan Momen

First, the human mind is strictly finite and limited in knowledge and understanding. Second, no absolute knowledge of God or reality or the cosmos is therefore available to man. Third, from the above it follows that all conceptualizations and attempts by men to portray cosmology are “but a reflection of what has been created within themselves.”

Muriel Atkin

a cavalry unit in the Persian army established in 1879 on the model of Cossack units in the Russian army. The formation of the Cossack Brigade was part of a larger process in which the Persian government, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, engaged various European soldiers to train units of the Persian armed forces.

Cross-Reference

Susan Siavoshi

Cottam was convinced of the moral superiority of U.S. and allied forces in their fight against fascism in Europe and the Far East. This belief lingered for some time after the end of the war, allowing him to form an idealistic view of the validity of U.S. values in its post-war struggle against communism.

Multiple Authors

Cotton (panba< Mid. Pers. pambag; katān; in Isfahan kolūza; genus Gossypium), particularly the short-staple species Gossypium herbaceum, is cultivated in almost all parts of Persia, and is of great economic importance both for home consumption and for export.

Eckart Ehlers and Ahmad Parsa

Cotton (panba < Mid. Pers. pambag; katān; in Isfa­han kolūza; genusGossypium), particularly the short-staple species Gossypium herbaceum, is cultivated in almost all parts of Persia, and is of great economic importance both for home consumption and for export.

Hassan Hakimian

Cotton was one of the first vegetable fibers used to make textiles, and, despite competition from synthetic fibers in recent times, it remains the most important nonfood agricultural commodity in the world.

Daniel Balland

Two Iranian words, paḵta (< Tajik) and pomba (Pers. panba < Pahl. pambag), are currently used in Afghani­stan to designate raw cotton. Most people use them fairly indiscriminately, but specialists tend to confine the former to unginned, or seed, cotton and the latter to ginned, or fiber, cotton (Pashto mālūǰ/č).

Niloofar Shambayati

Mark J. Gasiorowski

the appointment of Moḥammad Moṣaddeq as prime minis­ter of Persia on 9 Ordībehešt 1330 Š./29 April 1951 and the nationalization two days later of Persia’s British-owned oil industry initiated a period of tense confrontation between the Persian and British govern­ments.

Multiple Authors

Courts and courtiers i. In the Median and Achaemenid periods, ii. In the Parthian and Sasanian periods, iii. In the Islamic period to the Mongol conquest, iv. Under the Mongols, v. Under the Timurid and Turkman dynasties, vi. In the Safavid period, vii. In the Qajar period, viii.In the reign of Reżā Shah Pahlavī, ix. In the reign of Moḥammad-Reżā Shah. See SUPPLEMENT, x.Court poetry

Muhammad A. Dandamayev

From Herodotus’ report of the child Cyrus’ playing at being king it seems that the Median court included bodyguards, messengers, the “king’s eye," and builders, for it is likely that the game was modeled on the existing court.

Philippe Gignoux

C. E. Bosworth

In Persia the organization of courts (Pers. bār, bādrgāh, dargāh, darbār; in Arabic, there exists no more precise designation than majles, lit. “session”), including the formation of a circle of courtiers in the early centuries after the Islamic conquest, was directly inspired by the court life of the ʿAbbasid caliphs at Baghdad and Sāmarrāʾ.

Peter Jackson

During the early stages of the Mongol presence Persia was ruled, on behalf of the great khan (qaḡan, qaʾan/qāʾān) in Mongolia, by military governors based in Azerbaijan and in Khorasan, but, with the coming of Hülegü (Hūlāgū) in 654/1256 and the establishment of the Il-khanid state, the country was once again the seat of a resident sovereign.

Roger M. Savory

Abbas Amanat

The court (darbār, darbār-e aʿẓam, dar(b)-e ḵāna) in the Qajar period was essentially organized on the ancient Perso-Turkish model inherited from the Safavid and Zand courts but with modifications in practice and function largely designed to accommo­date the Qajars’ nomadic habits.

A. Reza Sheikholeslami

When Reżā Shah (r. 1304-20 Š./1925-1941) acceded to the throne he retained a number of lower officials from the royal court of the Qajars, specifically those who had not been vocal in support of republicanism.

Cross-Reference

Parvin Loloi

Cross-Reference

Floreeda Safiri

, Sir (b. Herongate, near Brentwood, Essex, England, 20 November 1864, d. Bedford, England, 20 February 1937), officer of the political service in the British Indian government who held several diplomatic posts in the Persian Gulf re­gion in 1893-1923 and played a leading role in nego­tiating the Anglo-Persian Agreement of 1919.

Although crafts have always played a predominant role in the artistic history of Persia, in this century new market forces and social currents have interacted with deeply rooted traditions to produce new types of objects, as well as variations on more familiar ones.

Hūšang Aʿlam

(kolang), any of the large migratory wading birds of the family Gruidae. The kolang is mentioned in the Bundahišn as one of 110 species of birds. In classi­cal Persian poetry the crane’s ability to fly high and far; its order, discipline, and characteristic whooping sounds in flight are mentioned.

Cross-Reference

Parviz Saney

S. C. Anderson

(nahang, Baluchi gandū), Croco­dylus palustris, the marsh crocodile. It inhabits fresh-water marshes, pools, and rivers, and probably the only suitable croco­dile habitat in Persian Baluchistan is along the Sarbāz river. The present intermittent distribution of this species in Pakistan and Persian Baluchistan represents a fragmentation of a once more continuous range during moister climatic regimes in the recent past.

Ronald E. Emmerick

Hūšang Aʿlam

a bird of the family Corvidae, represented in Persia and Afghanistan by six genera. Several of their features are more or less reflected in Persian literature and folklore. In poetry the blackness of the feathers (par[r]-e zāḡ) has often been used in similes to emphasize the blackness or darkness of a lock of hair, a certain night, clouds, and the like.

Multiple Authors

Peter Calmeyer

In the Achaemenid period rulers were represented wearing two different kinds of crown. Most common was a rigid cylinder with crenellated decoration, which had a long tradition in Persia; crenellations appeared on the Elamite rock relief at Kūrāngūn in Fārs and were revived again for the crown of the Pahlavi dynasty.

Elsie H. Peck

It was under the Sasanian mon­archs that the crown, quintessential symbol of royal power, received its most elaborate and varied forms. From the earliest representations it is clear that new shapes were not adopted immediately; rather, the royal headgear of the conquered enemy was at first contin­ued.

Elsie H. Peck

One of the most durable types of royal headgear was the winged crown, first observed on coins and reliefs of the Sasanian Bahrām II and adopted for the stucco figure of a ruler, perhaps the caliph, on the facade of the Omayyad palace of Qaṣr al-Ḥayr al-­Ḡarbī in Syria.

A. Shapur Shahbazi

Despite the collapse of the Persian empire in 651 and the abhorrence of imperial titles and regalia in early Islamic traditions, Omayyad and ʿAbbasid governors, as well as the rulers of Ṭabarestān, continued to employ on their coins the iconography of the coins of the Sasanian rulers Ḵosrow II and Yazdegerd III.

Yaḥyā Ḏokāʾ

Fatḥ-ʿAlī Shah (r. 1797-1834) ordered the cre­ation of a tall, jeweled crown with eight peaks on a red velvet cap, the Kayānī crown. From that time on all Qajar kings wore this crown, which is now kept in the Bānk-e markazī-e Īrān (Central bank of Iran).

A. Shapur Shahbazi

Mahmoud Omidsalar

by the French orientalist Henri Massé (b. Lunéville, France, 2 March 1886, d. Paris, 9 November 1969), published in 1938, one of the most compre­hensive and reliable texts on general Persian folklore in a Western language.

Peter Jackson

in relation to Persia; the term “crusade” refers to a series of Christian holy wars fought in the Middle Ages against the Muslims in Syria and Palestine and subsequently elsewhere in the Near East and, by extension, to wars against other enemies, both within and outside Christendom, that were put on the same spiritual footing by the popes.

Layla S. Diba

originally a type of fine glass developed in England in the 17th century and owing its special clarity and brilliance to the high refractive index of lead oxide in the metal; the term is often applied to fine glass in general.

Rüdiger Schmitt

the conventional name for a system of writing ultimately derived from the pictographic script developed by the Sumerians in southern Mesopotamia (Uruk) around 3000 B.C.E. Cuneiform was written with a reed stylus, which left wedge-shaped impressions on soft clay tablets.

Cross-Reference

Jean-Pierre Digard

or čōbān “shepherd” (Mid. Pers. and NPers. šobān); even today the shepherd remains a central figure, in both the technological life and consequently the symbolic life, of all systems of animal husbandry.

Cross-Reference

James R. Russel

Cross-Reference

Philip Huyse

(probably fl. 1st century c.e.), author of the only extant Latin mono­graph on Alexander the Great, usually called Historiae Alexandri Magni, in many respects the most complete and liveliest account of Alexander’s exploits in Asia.

Denis Wright

Willem Floor

a tax levied on the movement of trade. A new law ensuring Persian autonomy in establishing tariffs (ḥoqūq-e gomrokī) was enacted on 1 May 1928; it provided for an ad valorem tariff on most goods, with special rates for certain luxuries like gold, silver, and tobacco.

I. M. Diakonoff

Edith Porada

CYLINDER SEALS. The seals of ancient Persia correspond in their types and use to those of Mesopotamia, beginning with amuletic pendants, which could also be used as seals, and developing into elaborately engraved seal stones, with a change in the Uruk period from stamp to cylinder seals.

Hūšang Aʿlam

(sarv), Cupressus (Tourn.) L. The genus Cupressus is represented in Persia by one spe­cies (sempervirens L.), with three varieties: the cereiform (cereiformis Rehd.), called sarv-e nāz in Shiraz; the more common pyramidal or fastigiate, variously called sarv-e šīrāzī (Shiraz cypress) and sarv-e kāšī (Kāšān cypress); and the horizontal, known popularly by several names but usually referred to as zarbīn by modern Persian botanists.

Michael Weiskopf

The historical tradition, preserved for the most part by Diodorys Siculus, was much influenced by Isocrates’ erroneous perception of the Achaemenid empire as in a state of decline, seething with discontent and secret disloyalty to the great king.

Antigone Zournatzi

,in the Achaemenid period. The kings of the southeastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus reportedly submitted willingly to Cyrus II and offered military assistance to the Persians in their campaigns against Caria and Babylon (539 BCE).

Muhammad A. Dandamayev

Robert Faulkner

Xenophon, in his work The Education of Cyrus, makes Cyrus’s imperial founding the theme of a biography; for Herodotus, that founding dominates only Book 1 of nine parts apparently devoted to the Persian-Greek wars decades later.

Muhammad A. Dandamayev

The Cyrus cylinder is a fragmentary clay cylinder with an Akkadian inscription of thirty-five lines discovered in a foundation deposit by A. H. Rassam during his excavations at the site of the Marduk temple in Babylon in 1879.

Antigoni Zournatzi

The tomb of Cyrus is generally identified with a small stone monument approximately 1 km southwest of the palaces of Pasargadae, in the center of the Morḡāb plain. According to Greek sources, the tomb of Cyrus II 559-29 B.C.E.) was located in the royal park at Pasargadae.